Bald Ambition
Here’s something more bloggy and slightly less beat-related than usual. I needed to write it for various reasons, but if you’re only really here for the “Oddities and Ends” section you can go ahead and command+F for it!
For this newsletter’s fourth birthday two Junes ago, I decided to finally make good on a project that had been bouncing around in my head forever: “A Moving-Image History of Parkwood Entertainment.” The concept boils down to “a cinephile walks you through fellow cinephile Beyoncé’s life and career,” or maybe it’s classifiable as a quasi-biography of the superstar that pivots around her relationship to movies. But it’s also often felt like me writing my way to figuring out why this artist with eight directorial features to her name, including a couple of the most significant titles of the century, isn’t terribly respected—or, a lot of the time, recognized—as a filmmaker.
The original plan, way back when, was an over-the-summer thing, one we’d all be out of by around this time last year. (A hilarious side note is that the series was originally not a series at all, and indeed titled “A Brief History of Parkwood Entertainment.”) But between certain life goings-on and the basic fact that I’d underestimated my own project and what I wanted to do with it—“a classic case of scope creep,” you should picture Scott saying to me over and over—it’s officially tracking to take up a solid year and a half of my life. In August, I published the second part of Vol. III, which revolves around Lemonade (2016) and the smaller releases on either side of it, and that means I finally get to have some fun alongside my subject herself as I attempt to narrativize her 2018-present era.
Mononym Mythology
If you can tolerate the length, I do think that my series contains some of my best writing ever (perhaps putting aside Vol. I, which I seem to have a love-hate relationship with). It’s also had me revisiting and making connections with a bunch of past work; as I approach my 30th birthday in January, pursuing it has involved a lot of reflecting on my own life and career so far, and seeing how I was always kind of headed for this project. Though some would caution (and have cautioned) that I shouldn’t necessarily be publishing my “best writing ever” for free—the series is essentially a book presented via long-ass web pages—I’m more so glad that it can reach anyone anywhere, and I’m grateful for the new friends it’s been making me all over the internet/world.
Those who’ve given my sorta-book a chance (much appreciated in this era of short-form video and AI summaries) have tended to say kind things about it—that it feels like a guided tour through “the Museum of Beyoncé,” that it’s made them “see her more fully as an artist and a person,” that they’re a stan but had no idea about x or y (me neither, in many cases). And all of this helps with the whole self-exploitation aspect, which I’ll still try not to replicate in the future. Once this project is wrapped, I’ll have to figure out how I can adapt and extend and reimagine it.
I plan on getting more into the behind-the-scenes of all of this some other time—there’s realistically an AMA in my future, so you can feel free to start thinking about (or even sending over) questions—but you can probably imagine that it felt extremely good to celebrate the 100k+ words I’ve written back in July, when I caught my sixth (!) Beyoncé show in Atlanta. (It was technically also my fourth Jay-Z show, since he came out as a surprise, and my first time seeing either Rumi or Blue Ivy Carter, since Blue didn’t come out during Toronto’s Renaissance stops.)
The bulk of my Cowboy Carter Tour thoughts will need to go into Vol. IV, where I’ll be properly getting into some of the tour’s (and album’s!) cinematic influences and implications, but for now let me just say that the part of the show that’s really been sticking with me is its entire opening section—particularly Beyoncé singing along to Jimi Hendrix’s Woodstock rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which I’ll absolutely be doing some mental gymnastics to argue is a film reference. I’m also pretty sure that American stadiums hold too many people, but that claim’s harder to back up.
Like lots of others, I bought my two Beyoncé tickets in February on a ridiculously overpriced whim (and more on that in a second). But perhaps unlike too many others—or even my past self, who once flew to Vancouver without a second thought to see On the Run II in 2018—that purchase marked the beginning of a four-month stint where I was genuinely stumped about whether to really go. So much so that I at one point had to make a literal pros and cons chart and see which of the two lists was longer. I’d be losing money regardless because of what I’d paid, so it came down to other factors—the general logistical headache of travelling with a body that likes to sabotage me, the knowledge that I’d probably have to do so alone based on usual-travel-buddy availability, a big wave of headlines scaring any Canadians looking to travel to the US, and so on.
But it was also about me feeling a little less… together: on the particular day that I bought my tour tickets, which my email tells me was Valentine’s Day, I’d gone almost entirely bald over the previous couple of months.
To make a complicated—and stupid—story more succinct, two back-to-back seasons of unmanaged stress around late 2023/early 2024 (some work drama, some health drama, a surprise puppy who’s been marked innocent here, etc.) gave way to two back-to-back seasons of trying to pharmaceutically tame the periods that had turned erratic and generally evil on me from said stress. Getting my brain under control would probably have been the thing to try first, but I was following the advice of doctors I trusted, and there was some talk that messing with my hormones might improve my famously bad digestion in a roundabout way.
By the fall of last year, my body had arguably started to send me signals that my immune system was confused and in overdrive, not taking well to the sudden chemical changes that came with switching on and off of various drugs. I was puffy and moody and had the worst eczema of my adult life, but I’d also started developing a bald spot behind my right ear—one that I definitely noticed because I remember joke-complaining about it, but honestly didn’t think much of at the time. You can see it in several of the photos we took throughout Europe in September and October, since a running bit on that trip was that we were building a photo album called “What if we kissed…” as we went from city to city.
In the first week of December, I very suddenly began losing a frightening amount of hair during every shower and with every brush. And I’m talking a literal handful or two a day, but where I still looked like myself because I had so much hair. This made the problem seem not that urgent to a couple of doctors who saw me and were unmoved by what they saw. As I sat there shedding and sometimes crying in their offices, it was suggested that it might be related to my iron levels being too low a full year and a half prior (I’d since significantly improved them), and the OB/GYN overseeing my pharmaceutical adventures claimed he’d never seen a patient experience hair weirdness after a hormonal shift. (You’ll find this bizarre if you or anyone you know has ever given birth, or gone through menopause, or weathered a big life change, or or or.)
I started to take lots of photos and even collect what I was brushing out in one place, I guess because I wanted to be able to prove and/or wrap my head around the progression and volume, and quickly became the owner of a creepy Ziploc bag full of hair that I still have in my bathroom drawer. (Bids start at $50,000.)
By Christmas, I’d connected with the kind dermatologist who’d put everyone else to shame, but the only thing he could do at that stage was inject some experimental cortisone into my aforementioned bald spot, which I’d by now realized was probably a harbinger of doom. Though my hairline had already thinned out enough for me to be able to see it—because my head stole the show, it would take me many more weeks to realize that I was in fact losing all of my body hair save for my eyelashes—it wasn’t that noticeable to anyone else until about mid-January, when I became what I’ve been calling a “hats-only situation.” (By then, in case you were wondering, I’d also cold-turkeyed off of everything but my allergy meds, in what was technically one more—but final—hormonal shift.)
As 2024 turned to 2025, my pillow was covered in hair every time I woke up, and life was a constant cycle of googling and vacuuming and trying to minimize how much hair the dog was ingesting (it’s probably best that I don’t elaborate). But life was otherwise decently normal, since it was winter (headwear season) and I work from the relative privacy of home. Though I opted out of having a birthday party, I went skiing (helmet) and out for dinner (borrowed leopard-print bucket hat) and to alumni events (toque), and though it sometimes took a few extra seconds for people to recognize me—I’ll come back to that in a bit—I was still very much outside. My friend Izzy, aka Be Kind Rewind, also unknowingly bought me some time by uploading her big video essay on Lady Gaga’s acting career, for which I’d filmed my parts back in the fall.
When I showed up for my derm follow-up in February, ten or so weeks since I’d first clocked myself losing hair by the handful, I think I shocked him when I pulled my hat off and had maybe 15% of mine left. We biopsied my scalp to determine what kind of alopecia we were looking at—that word apparently just means “hair loss,” where there are several different variations—and prescribed me eight weeks of a steroid to ask my immune system to chill the fuck out. I went home, inexplicably bought Cowboy Carter tickets in a different country just to do something reckless (or optimistic, depending on your outlook), and decided that as soon as my biopsy scar healed I’d be making the transition from Gollum to Sinéad. I no longer really thought of the wisps of hair I was sporting as my own.
I officially shaved my head on February 21—or rather, Scott did while I sat there in my Born This Way 10th anniversary hoodie. It was a funny scene: my very hungover sister acted as videographer and ramen-orderer, my dog was high as a kite recovering from being both neutered and stomach-tacked in one go, and we even grabbed another “what if we kissed…” entry for the road.
That there’s a song on that Lady Gaga album called “Hair,” which opens on a young girl being ‘shorn of her identity’ via a haircut from her mom, was more of a twisted coincidence than anything (and it didn’t actually occur to me in the moment). But it’s true that I’d always felt kind of synonymous with my hair: I was born, it grew, and, because people around me often complimented it growing up—I loved lice checks at school as much for the reliable ego boost as the scalp tickle—I’d never thought to touch it in terms of either colour or cut (except for maybe getting a couple more inches taken off at my annual chop). It didn’t want to be anything other than straight, uncurling itself over the course of something like a prom; it preferred to be parted on the left side and only the left side; it seemed to get blonder in the summer and darker in the winter.
Another way of putting all of this is that I’d looked virtually the same my entire life, carrying around the same hair that my parents have always had and that my sister has. And—[bravely, clearing my throat]—I liked it quite a bit, even if I sometimes wondered whether it would be more interesting to have curls the way every straight-haired person does. I didn’t really take it for granted, either; in times that my self-esteem has historically wavered, I was generally pretty grateful to have it there to hide behind.
Based on what I just said, it would be reasonable to expect that shaving my head was traumatic—and everyone around me seemed to be holding their breath ahead of the inevitable breakdown I’d managed to stave off so far. But the event was actually somehow anti-climactic, the most intentional and in control I’d felt in months. I don’t know if my brain was trying to protect me, or if I’d simply gotten most of my tears out by then, but I was just fine—genuinely interested to see what the experience might teach me in my 29th year of life, and resolved to truly take good care of my body and mind going forward.
I also kept thinking that I had little girls in my life who’d probably be paying attention to how I played a sudden appearance change, that there might be some power as a semi-visible person in not feigning embarrassment or grief that I didn’t actually feel.
And while my goal with this piece isn’t necessarily to recount the medical saga any more than I have, said saga did include a couple of moments that I found a lot worse than shaving my head—trying to sleep with a painful scar just after my biopsy, for instance, or the two months that I spent purposely taking and withdrawing from a powerful steroid over and over again (in what’s called “pulse therapy”).
During that latter stretch, so from about mid-February to mid-April, I found it difficult to work, cognitively as much as physically. Though I sometimes tweaked the timing here based on what I had on the go, Saturdays and Sundays were typically for taking eight pills that made me feel like I’d chugged four coffees, Mondays through Wednesdays were for lying on a heating pad when I wasn’t in the bathroom, and Thursdays and Fridays were for going out to dinner and trying to see friends and family in the flesh before I had to repeat the whole process. I did this a total of eight times.
One of the first things I’d already scheduled myself in for during that period was my interview with Em Maskell, who I’ll always remember was so lovely and supportive on a day that I didn’t feel very well—she has a new book out that you should go buy—and it still took me a month to transcribe and publish our conversation afterwards between everything I had going on. I did do some editing work piecemeal because I couldn’t exactly stop working for two months, but getting into a good writing flow for something like the Parkwood series just wasn’t happening. (I was very lucky to have already published the first half of Vol. III in January, but this is partly why the second half took me so long.)
Mononym Mythology
In an interesting twist, my biopsy came back halfway through this steroid stint and said that I’d technically tested negative for any of the kinds of alopecia my dermatologist was expecting to see. That doesn’t make too much of a clinical difference as far as treatment, but it does mean that all of this may turn out to have been a bizarre one-off—an extreme bodily overreaction that I’ll never forget.
If it did happen again, a possibility I’ll probably always have in the back of my mind, it wouldn’t be the plan but it also wouldn’t be the end of the world. I would’ve told you a year ago that losing my hair was one of my worst nightmares, and it’s been kind of transformative to live out a so-called worst nightmare and not find it so nightmarish in practice. I arguably have other things going for me!
Either way, I’ve spent the past eight or so months gradually growing in about 92% of a real buzzcut, sticking with the G.I. Jane look while I do that because I still have a few stubborn bald patches; they get injected with more cortisone every six or so weeks. My eyebrows and body hair have also luckily returned—sort of with a vengeance, though I won’t get into that right now.
This progress is from some mixture of medication, lifestyle changes, smearing things on my head, and—above all else—patience while my hormones have evened out and each thing has gotten a chance to make its impact. Hair loss episodes sometimes bring pigment and even texture changes, and my post-February hair has slowly evolved from a ghastly white, to a dark brown, to something resembling my original red with the odd grey in there. We’ll have to see about texture, but this is what I looked like the other day while checking my makeup ahead of a Taylor Swift-related interview for the news. This is about as long as I let it get these days.
I actually started walking around bald almost immediately in February—wigs weren’t really for me, physically or conceptually—but I’d given myself until June (totally arbitrary) to lay low on the work front, knowing it was probably wise at that point to just throw myself into the deep end and keep it moving. I’d be looking something like this for a long time, and again wasn’t all that interested in performing devastation about something I wasn’t finding devastating.
On June 12, I kicked off what I’ve been jokingly calling my Bald Ambition Tour by video-introducing Madonna: Truth or Dare (1991) at London’s Prince Charles Cinema… a few hours before reading some of Vol. II at one of Saffron Maeve’s Crit Salon events here in Toronto—an intercontinental bald reveal! No one ran screaming on either side of the pond, at least to my knowledge, and it was great to be back in the saddle.
I posted a mirror selfie the next day, opening myself up to a surprise flood of haircut fetishists—that’s a story for another time, methinks—but also lots of less suggestive compliments from friends and family and strangers, who gassed me up so much that I figured I’d make Atlanta official. I was definitely anxious to travel alone, especially given that I don’t look much like my official ID photos right now, but I also wanted to treat myself a bit after everything I’d been through. And to be honest, my FOMO was likely to win out over my list of logistical concerns.
With the exception of the Beyoncé part—and that I got to see her with my Atlanta friend Mary, with whom I was long overdue for a catch-up—that July weekend was a lot like any other in 2025: my showers flew by because I didn’t have much to do in there, people around me sometimes did double-takes before they went back to whatever they’d been doing, and strangers were noticeably generous with their smiles and even free drinks. (People tend to assume that I’ve battled something more serious, which I guess makes sense—and I do correct them if it comes up in conversation.)
I felt a little like a raw nerve for a lot of the trip, but I seem to have gotten myself to the show and back okay, and I think I’d be uneasy right now trying to write about the tour for Vol. IV if I hadn’t been in the room.
There are aspects of this whole experience that I may be processing for some time; it hits me in unexpected pangs here and there, but mostly in the sense of me feeling bad for my past self (though I’m equally shocked by her bravery and still not entirely sure where it came from). Even then, I think everyone around me has been surprised by how little any of this has truly mattered, and we all agree that there are scarier reasons to lose your hair.
As with basically anything in life, it’s good days and worse days: I love how fast I can get ready; I’m not always in the mood to be looked at and wondered about from across a restaurant; my four-year-old niece still asks me to colour with her; some of my clothes no longer seem to make sense; I’ve noticed that my skin has gotten substantially thicker (at least figuratively speaking, and that’s a cortisone joke for the dermatologists in the room); I’m sick of people asking how my husband is holding up in all of this.
2025, aka 29, has also been a pretty transitional year for me across the board. Whether or not you vibe with the concept of a Saturn Return—I’m not terribly astrology-minded, and yet I’ve been finding it hard to argue with—this final bit of my 20s has involved a lot of reassessing and resetting, with examples ranging from the silly/surmountable (the concealer I’ve used for 20 years was discontinued, my favourite dentist has retired, friends and family are changing addresses and career paths and countries in ways that affect me, etc.) to the more paramount/permanent (in August, I was gifted a brand-new niece more or less in tandem with losing my grandmother).
A complete shake-up of my appearance—and, with it, a scrambling of everything from my personal style to my priorities—is honestly sort of perfect, maybe even welcome.
This has obviously been a lot of words to read about something not within the usual scope of this newsletter, but if you’ve engaged with my work at any point in the past year or so, perhaps you’ll appreciate that this has been happening in the background of it. It’s also added a funny layer to pop culture: everything related to Eusexua (2025), bald people winning (and being asked about their scalp-care routines) during awards season, Jennie and Doechii rapping on a bald guy’s head in the “ExtraL” video, Emma Stone shaving her head—and bizarrely resembling both my before and after photos—for Bugonia (2025), Timothée Chalamet debuting his buzzcut via IG Live the other day, and so on.
But I’ll tell you one more thing: when I was a kid, I was taken to dancing around my grandparents’ house while listening to Shania Twain, specifically. (My grandpa, whom I never knew as anything other than bald, apparently used to say she was the most beautiful woman in the world who wasn’t his wife.) One day while doing this, I somehow smoked the side of my head on the corner of their kitchen counter. I don’t remember the incident itself that well, only the next however many minutes that I had to lie down on the couch clutching a tea towel (and maybe ice?) to my head. I was probably four or five—young enough to have not previously known that blood has a smell.
The adults around me decided that I likely didn’t need stitches—and I don’t have any memories of a healing process, so it seems like that decision worked out. But it was only upon shaving my head this year that I learned I actually have a pretty sizeable scar there, the kind people will see in the months to come and wrongly assume is my biopsy scar (which you can’t really see because it’s both tiny and well-placed). This means not only that I’ve already secretly had a bald spot for a quarter of a century and survived, but that it’s also one evincing a certain lifelong commitment to one’s craft! ●
A long overdue—and therefore extended—Oddities and Ends...
- 2025 so far in watching shows months or years late: we waited until a little after The Pitt had stopped airing to watch it, and devoured it in something like five days; it’s kind of impossible to stop once you start. I really liked Anne Helen Petersen’s piece on how the show is really about various systems under strain, plus this Jen Chaney one on the unusual way it’s shot. We then finally watched the first season of True Detective, and it was “funny” (it’s a terrifying scene) to see Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson running around the same Civil War landmark where Beyoncé shot a lot of Lemonade. (We’re now in the middle of the third season)
- As I’ve mentioned here and there, I’ve been trying something new in 2025 and keeping my video longlist as an unlisted YouTube playlist, which I update weekly or so after my big screening blocks. By “longlist,” what I actually mean is “videos that stuck out somehow that I’ll have to watch again later this year to make my shortlist.” That’s generally because I thought something was cool or at least worth a second look, and it’s less often something more like surprise or bafflement or disgust (etc.) speaking. In keeping with what I’ve written in the past about music videos suffering not from a lack of creativity but a lack of curation, I’m trying to cut through all that noise and pick out things you might find interesting. Still haven’t decided how to present my 2025 shortlist, so let me know if you have ideas
- The Coachella section: I watched four sets this year, which is actually more than I ever have—Marinachella (I couldn’t get over how amazing she looked), Megchella, Charlichella, and of course Gagachella, which feels like it might be Lady Gaga’s greatest performance ever. I loved my soulmate Coleman Spilde’s piece about how it “makes a case for beauty in an ugly world.” (Enemy fanbases have been criticizing Gaga’s decision to carry a lot of the show over to the Mayhem Ball and some of her other one-off shows this year, but I don’t know why you’d fix something that a] isn’t broken and b] took so much work—and so recently! For the record: having caught the Mayhem Ball in Toronto on 9/11, where she actually performed “Hair” as a surprise song—my life is so funny—it didn’t feel like the same show at all)
- Given what I just said about Gagachella, I was pleasantly surprised to so quickly get another all-timer Gaga performance: her official sort of initiation into the world of Tim Burton via her Tudum performance of “Zombieboy”/“Bloody Mary”/“Abracadabra,” which honestly did more for me than any of the Burton stuff that has since followed (though “The Dead Dance” still made my 2025 longlist)
- I had zero familiarity with John Cage prior to editing Ethan Warren’s essay about the former’s “4’33”. Aside from feeling like I got something of a Cage 101, I loved the particular way that Ethan goes about the actual storytelling, making his kids into characters and even covering the piece himself at the end
- Also working with Ethan, I got to edit this wonderful collection of essays celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Mountain Goats’ The Sunset Tree (2005). Again, I knew virtually nothing about the “band” prior, but that’s what I like about editing
- Some miscellaneous writing recs: “Work Songs: Tiny Desk Concerts Reimagines Music Video and Public Radio” (Eric Harvey, Flow); “The Wiz: Ease on Down the Red Carpet” (Russell Nichols, Bright Wall/Dark Room); “Superbad: Looking Bad” (Katherine Connell, Bright Wall/Dark Room); How Sabrina Carpenter Dream-Come-True’d Her Whole Life” (Angie Martoccio, Rolling Stone); “Kanye West Bought an Architectural Treasure—Then Gave It a Violent Remix” (Ian Parker, The New Yorker); “Hate gave you me for a lover” (Carrie Courogen, bed crumbs); Lisztomania (Carmen Paddock, Cinema Year Zero); “Where to Look: The Silence of the Lambs” (Veronica Fitzpatrick, Bright Wall/Dark Room); “Bringing Sexy Back” (Kate Wagner, Lux); “A Life with Less Pleasure Reading” (Anne Helen Petersen, Culture Study); “The Tragedy of ‘Stomp Clap Hey’” (Mitch Therieau, Defector); “Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni, and the Collapse of the Hollywood #MeToo Era” (Doreen St. Félix, The New Yorker); “Crimes of the Century” (Suzy Hansen, Intelligencer); “Let’s unpack the ‘Gaylor Crashouts’” (Kat Tenbarge, Spitfire News); “No Courage, No Heart, No Brain” (Nicholas Russell, Defector)
- I didn’t know until Ozzy Osbourne’s death that B. Åkerlund, a frequent collaborator of his since the early ‘00s, had actually appeared on The Osbournes
- I loved Izzy’s essay on Todd Haynes’s Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987), whose saga she breaks down excellently and using a storytelling device that genuinely floored me
- On August 19, I locked eyes with the one and only Tate McRae out of my Uber window. “Sports car” is one of my most-listened-to songs of the year, which I hope she discerned from my gaze
- As many of you know, I’m constantly watching visual albums while I work on… whatever that’s gonna be… and that involves watching a lot of bad or underwhelming ones in the hopes of eventually seeing another good one. Balloonerism (2025), an animated short attached to the newest Mac Miller posthumous release, is one of my big surprises of the year. I also highly recommend throwing on Listening to the Sun (2024), a film André 3000 put out to accompany his flute album with all those batshit song titles
- Though I love Miley Cyrus’s Something Beautiful (2025) the album, I was unfortunately underwhelmed by the film, which I’m giving its own bullet to say that it definitely could’ve been 10x as strange—given Panos Cosmatos producing, given what the album sounds like, and even given Miley’s past visual work. I spent a good stretch of 2025 going through her career alongside Taylor Swift’s, and Plastic Hearts (2020) is the project that I find myself wishing had been given this kind of full-blown visual treatment. (As a side note, the Bangerz Tour and Cowboy Carter Tour are on the same page in so many unlikely but funny ways.) Meanwhile, I found Miley’s Spotify Billions Club episode extremely compelling, I imagine in part because it’s very clear about what it is and why everyone involved is making it
- I’m also giving Jade’s That’s Showbiz Baby! (2025) its own bullet because it’s very much worth your time and hasn’t yet cracked a half a million views. This was one of my most-anticipated projects of the year even before it was revealed upon release to be a visual album, where both “Angel of My Dreams” and “Fantasy” had been included in my 2024 video wrap-up. The finished product feels designed for me in that it plays right into my personal pop-culture Holy Trinity—feeling like a child of The Fame (2008)/The Fame Monster (2009) in terms of focus and tone, seeing Jade collaborate with her younger self in the vein of many Beyoncé projects, and containing an explicit reference to Madonna’s “Don’t Tell Me” (2000)
- A NSFW recommendation is Sex (1992), the documentary Fabien Baron made of the shoots for Madonna’s Sex book from that year. (It plays sort of like a longer version of his “Erotica” video)
- Did you know that Sabrina Carpenter once competed against other Miley Cyrus fans in a superstar-scouting contest via MileyWorld.com? Believe it or not (you’ll believe it), I stumbled across this organically while going through old videos on Miley’s YouTube account
- Some hit recipes from the past little while: this tofu noodle stir fry, this yogurt marinated chicken, this creamy sausage ditalini (comically good given how simple it is), this mezze plate, this Benihana-inspired hibachi chicken bowl, this broccoli mac and cheese, this carbonara fried rice, this cucumber and tomato breakfast/lunch (also simple but game-changing), and this “YET” (yogurt, egg, tomato) breakfast/lunch (similarly game-changing)
- The best book I’ve read all year is Xuanlin Tham’s Revolutionary Desires: The Political Power of the Sex Scene (2025)
- There were a couple weeks over the summer where I exclusively seemed to watch documentaries about film scoring, and my two big recs are Ennio (2021), an authorized but excellent epic about Signore Morricone, and Score (2016), which is on the more basic side but provides a lot of useful history on the field (feat. a galling amount of special guests)
- There’s a moderately heated debate happening right now online about whether Demi Lovato is angling for her own Brat (2024) era, both because she’s making dance-pop again and because she’s been promoting her new singles at clubs with long black hair. Some have argued that Demi is “the OG Brat,” and perhaps that’s true, but I’ll throw in that she’s been working with the same creative director and arguably doing Brat retread after Brat retread with her music videos so far. That said, I’m very into the songs themselves!
- Like a lot of people, I’ve been finding Chappell Roan’s performance attire jaw-droppingly beautiful, and my favourite looks all seem to have been styled by Genesis Webb and jointly designed by James Nguyen and Alexander Cole, who happen to be a couple. Here’s a handy slideshow, though it doesn’t include the recent swashbuckling look that inspired this bullet in the first place
- I’ve long been a Slayyyter enjoyer and particularly appreciate her world-building; the ’80s De Palma-esque creative direction for her last album, Starfucker (2023), felt like it was pulled right from my Tumblr likes in the same way that Beyoncé’s Renaissance (2022) photography did. But there’s something uniquely exciting to me about her forthcoming album project, which at this point consists of just “Beat Up Chanel$” and “Cannibalism!” She has directorial credits on both videos, and the second video in particular has helped the track itself quickly become one of my top songs of the year. As always, Coleman came through with the perfect summation
- I don’t blame anyone for bristling at the premise of this video—older white guy dismisses Cowboy Carter (2024) on principle, then discovers it’s a masterpiece upon actually listening to it—but I honestly found it quite fascinating to hear someone with zero fluency in Beyoncé talk about the project’s merits... almost more meaningful because he has zero skin in the game. He makes a couple (rather harmless) factual mistakes along the way, but he’s also changed the way I’ve been hearing certain songs; I didn’t realize, for instance, that Stephen Stills is actually credited on “American Requiem” because the song interpolates Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth”
- In September, Scott and I saw—through very drunk eyes—Dua Lipa on her Radical Optimism Tour, where she brought out her friend Mustafa to duet the beautiful “Name of God,” whose video has won all of the major Canadian awards this past cycle. “Falling Forever” is still the Radical Optimism (2024) single that got away for me
- I’ve mentioned here and there that I’m writing something about Taylor Swift, so I’ll keep this as brief as possible. As a complete project, The Life of a Showgirl (2025) disappointed me the way it’s disappointed a lot of people; these are the three best things I’ve read about it so far. I’ve been thinking since I first heard it that it could have made a solid six-track EP, since I do think you get her at both her melancholic and mock-villainous bests—but “The Fate of Ophelia” will nevertheless almost certainly be my actual most-listened-to song of the year. Since reputation (2017), which is probably my favourite of Ms. Swift’s pop albums, she’s written several of a particular kind of song that I seem to get a lot out of because #ilivedit: you showed up just when I’d decided this love shit wasn’t for me. I experienced “Ophelia” for the first time via its music video at my local Cineplex, and that means I never really had a chance against it; aside from the fact that it relies mostly on practical effects (frustratingly rare for Taylor as of late, and therefore endearing) and was made into a big music-video event (again endearing), it very much taps into the romance novel-reading, Anne Shirley-identifying part of my brain!
Mononym Mythology is a newsletter by me, Sydney Urbanek, where I write about various intersections of popular music and moving images. If you got something out of this issue, feel free to share it with a friend or cover one of the caffeinated beverages I’ll need to finish the next issue. You can reply directly to this if you received it in your inbox, and otherwise my email is here. I’m also on X and Instagram.
